Volume 3 | Issue 7 | Autumn 2007

Vertigo launched in 1993 with support from Channel Four’s Cultural Fund, a legacy of the channel’s radical incarnation as a publishing house for independent production. The broadcasting map had been transformed in the 1980s when new production companies, including the regional film workshops, could bid for funding to extend the range of what it was possible to see and hear on television. Vertigo’s first editorial group involved many filmmakers alongside writers and academics, creators who had experienced the transformation of what was possible between the ’80s and ’90s, and who, with the new publication, aimed “not just to interrupt the flow of images with memory and history, but also to illumine what the present decade promises – the flowering of that independent work” (Marc Karlin, from the Editorial, Vol. 1, Issue 1).

Content

Post-Tarkovskian Russian auteurAleksandr Sokurov knows a thing or two about atmosphere. His elegaic Mother and Son, like fluid stained glass, caught the melancholy beauty of the earth as little else ever has. But there the mood served the meaning.

Ingmar Bergman gave the best line he ever wrote to his son Daniel, who directed the film Sunday’s Children from his father’s script in 1992. A boy is confronted by a ghost in a forest and asks him, “when will I die?” and the ghost, like an echo, answers, “always!”

India’s 60th anniversary in August was celebrated by stories of burgeoning prosperity qualified by an occasional, anxious reference to another India. India’s independent documentary filmmakers have given us some telling images of this ‘other India’ but even they are not themselves from it...

Despite originally wanting to study philosophy, Hungarian filmmaker Bela Tarr has always denied the use of symbols, allegories or metaphysics in his filmmaking, stating that cinema is something definite and that the lens only records real things that are there.

With the likes of Alfonso Cuarón and Alejandro González Iñárritu amongst his admirers, Carlos Reygadas has emerged as the Mexican filmmaker’s filmmaker. Moreover, with his three features to date, he has proved himself amongst the most distinctive voices in contemporary world cinema.

Murray Martin died on August 14th this year, a month short of the opening of the Side Gallery exhibition celebrating its thirty years as a catalyst and venue for documentary photography and nine months short of celebrations marking forty years of Amber film and photography collective.

The Black Audio Film Collective’s recent Retrospective The Ghost of Songs, curated by the Otolith Group, launched at FACT in Liverpool (02 February – 01 April 2007) before touring to Arnolfini in Bristol (28 April- 24 June 2007).

We’ve climbed a mountain and passed a valley of fear, there is thick woodland and in it a clearing. Butler’s Erewohn? Gun shots ring out. The camera explores the landscape, the fecund and verdant landscape.

That’s as Fortean weird as it gets: the mechanics of movement, the dietary and cultural improbabilities. Yes, local bad boys, George-Raft-fancying Bethnal Green hoodlums, liked to import American photo opportunities, screen and showbiz automata at the end of their tether...

In July 2007 John Wyver (owner of British television cultural production company Illuminations) met with us to speak about a recently completed project which aims to develop new forms of interactive television. Illuminations was commissioned to produce an interactive arts programme...

Peter Mettler exists between the conventional and the experimental, never entirely at home in either and yet fully dependent on each. He is a key member of Canada’s second-generation experimental cinema, a group that includes filmmakers like Mike Hoolboom, Richard Fung and Guy Maddin...

Our great cultural institutions are usually housed in imposing buildings which proclaim their solidity and permanence. Not so the British Film Institute. The National Film Theatre is tucked away under London’s Waterloo Bridge, near to where it was first installed for the Festival of Britain in 1951.

Earlier this year, Norwich International Animation Festival became AURORA – a change which arose less because of any need for a snappier or more marketing-friendly title, more because the words ‘animation festival’ had become little more than a noose.

An artist often seems to stand between the devil and the deep blue sea but a work of art can momentarily lift us out of that trap, briefly allowing us to understand our past and present and glimpse what could potentially happen in the future.

Trying to define the documentary film is, by any measurement, an uphill task. Is documentary a genre? Does it have a greater claim to ‘truth’ (whatever that might mean) than a fictional feature or short? Quite simply, what is it?

It’s now hard to imagine that Brighton & Hove did not have a film festival to call its own. We recognised that as a new regional festival it was in our own interest to try and offer something distinctive. Key for us has always been placing artists’ moving image/experimental cinema at the heart of the programme...

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. The opening sentence of A Tale of Two Cities might very well describe the situation of art cinema in Paris. That it is the worst of times need hardly be proven.

The first ‘Festival de Granada Cines Del Sur’ took place in the southern Spanish city this June. The festival name, Cinemas from the South, refers to that fertile – and often neglected – cinema from the geopolitical south.

The Cinema Marquee, the metal structure that holds the exterior signage, is frequently requisitioned by those believing themselves carriers of urgent, apocalyptic messages, Cassandra-like obsessive who see it as an oversized rectangular glow-in-the-dark Ouija board.

In a survey of Czech film critics held in 1998, František Vláčil’s Marketa Lazarová(1967) was voted the best Czech film ever made. It was based on a novel by the pre-war experimental writer and filmmaker, Vladislav Vančura, first published in 1931.

In 2002 I wrote a piece for Vertigo called ‘What Lies on the Web’, which tried to assess the types of moving images that were available online at the time, and which, if any, might offer a glimpse of future directions. Five years back feels like a very long way in net-time.

As the Iron Curtain swung across Europe the West was being analysed by Rockerfeller’s economic and demographic statisticians codifying norms of behaviour, using techniques of coercion to cast dispersion on Communists and Marxists.

One of the most imaginative filmmakers currently working, Asif Kapadia’s new authored feature is a primal tale of passion and violence set within the elemental landscapes of the North. The film plays in the London Film Festival this October and will be released next year.

A series of Vertigo sponsored events taking place in London this November will mark the fifth anniversary of Clash frontman Joe Strummer’s final show in the capital – a politically motivated benefit for striking London Fire fighters at Acton Town Hall.

I write in the night, but I see not only the tyranny. If that were all I saw, I would probably not have the courage to continue. I see people sleeping, stirring, getting up to drink water, whispering their projects or their fears, making love, praying, cooking something while the rest of the family is asleep...

In view of the poor fortunes of French post-war cinema and the critical immersion of the critics of Cahiers du cinéma in Hollywood, it is surprising that in 1959 it was nevertheless a film by a French filmmaker Alain Resnais, Hiroshima, mon amour, which won the greatest praise of those very critics.

In his classic 1951 essay ‘As in a Wood’, André Breton describes the value of cinema lying ‘in its power to disorient’. This effect is linked not to the content or ‘merits of a given film’ but in the viewing experience offered to the spectator by the spatial organisation of the cinema building.

British filmmaker Ken McMullen is a singular voice – innovative, engaged, enquiring – in international cultural life. Through his features, documentaries, plays, exhibitions and teaching he breaks down boundaries, between art and science, thought and action, life and its representation.

Following on from Working Stiffs, Tom Zaniello’s earlier reference guide to films about labour, this new volume offers a clear and easy-to-navigate survey of films dealing with different aspects of globalization.

A large part of my work as a filmmaker involves producing images for live multimedia events, and sometimes producing the events themselves as well. During the first five months of 2007, we produced five different shows that involved film and/or video projection with live music performance.

Jeremy Reed is one of Britain’s most imaginatively intense writers and a visionary in the definitive meaning of that word. A poet in all he is and writes, he is a prolific chronicler of consciousness as it unfolds on different planes, and in relation to personality, place, history and culture.

This October, some will celebrate the 30th anniversary of the ‘German Autumn’. Newspapers and TV will feed the audience with spotless archives and testimonies of the witnesses to these events. But what will they celebrate, really? The final and bloody stage of a revolutionary hope born in 1967-1968?

In all the various moods and styles through which relative time has manifested, great artists have always expressed nowness. Standing behind the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris and contemplating its grace and geometry, the delicate traceries of its rose windows...

Salt of this Sea is a low-budget, feature-length film which follows the story of Soraya, a working-class Palestinian refugee born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. Wild-at-heart and independent, she decides to return to the country that her grandfather was exiled from in 1948.

I love the double learning process which goes with making a documentary, not only playing with the medium but exploring the subject. It is only sad that it is never possible to pass on to the audience the whole experience.

Over the last few months, documentary film and factual television have come under great scrutiny from the media, academics and even filmmakers, who have questioned the ethical and editorial quality of recent films and programmes.

Something infinitely small, under certain conditions operates in a decisive manner. There is no mass so heavy but that a given point is equal to it; for a mass will not fall if a single point in it is upheld, provided that this point be the centre of gravity.